For Taylor Woo, a particular memory stands out from her time working at Harborview Medical Center in Seattle.

Woo, a Liberty High School junior, serves as a volunteer patient care liaison at the hospital, one of the largest in the Northwest. One day, she was asked to speak with an 8-year-old boy who’d been in a car accident with his parents and younger sister.

The boy was responsive, but his sister lay in coma in an adjacent bed.

Taylor Woo, a junior at Liberty High School, helps a visitor at Harborview Medical Center in Seattle.

“You can hear the heart monitor just beeping to her heart, and it was so hard to see,” Woo said. “It was sad how he couldn’t really comprehend what was happening with his parents.

Modern mountain men prove their mettle shooting 1800’s-style muzzleloaders

Steve Baima struggled with his muzzleloader. An old-timer watched as Baima tried to get his handmade rifle to fire. Instead of the advice Baima expected, the old-timer told him a line he’s never forgotten.

“He said, ‘I hate to tell you this, but your scalp is already on the pole,’” Baima said.

Above, Rich Downs, of Kirkland, fires at a target during a monthly meeting of the Cascade Mountain Men at the Issaquah Sportsmen’s Club shooting range. Below, Darrell Kapaun, of Duvall, puts black powder, a cotton patch and a lead bullet on the muzzle of his replica full-stock Hawken 1840’s flintlock rifle and prepares to tamp it down to the touch hole.

That drove home to Baima that his new hobby — he had just started to learn how to make and shoot black-powder guns — once was a life-or-death necessity. Originally, he said, muzzleloaders were needed for self-protection and to put food on the table.

So special, in fact, that the moment called for a new outfit. Ek arrived at Issaquah’s Baptist Church, near what is now the Darigold plant, wearing a new dress, knitted gloves and shoes specially ordered from Oregon.

City residents, of which there were only 500 at the time, arrived in droves to honor Ek and her classmates Mary and Olive Gibson.

Issaquah sets its sights on adding the French town of Savigny-le-Temple to its family of sister cities.

The city of Issaquah is expecting.

Like most new parents, city officials have a special glow in anticipation of the new arrival. Members of the City Council and Sister Cities Commission are anxiously waiting for a written proposal from the town of Savigny-le-Temple in France to establish a Sister City relationship.

ContributedMinister Mohamed Saad El Alami, mayor of Chefchaouen (center), and former Issaquah Mayor Ava Frisinger (right) walk through the Moroccan city’s streets with other delegation members and a security detail in 2007.

The transatlantic courtship began last fall, when a delegation of students from the French town came to Issaquah during Salmon Days and were so impressed they requested their city reach out to establish an official relationship. Leaders from the community 20 miles southeast of Paris have made plans to send another contingent of young people to the Northwest this summer.

More and more, people within the city are talking about the planned “green necklace.” It isn’t a gift of jewelry to citizens, but many see it as a gift to residents nonetheless.

The green necklace refers to a circle of parks and open spaces around the city, allowing easy pedestrian and bicycle access. It includes Lake Sammamish and the Issaquah Alps in the goal to surround the city and provide interconnected pathways between open spaces.

By Peter ClarkAnne McGill, Issaquah Parks & Recreation Department director, visits the future Phase 3 site of Confluence Park, in an area she hopes the city will name ‘Margaret’s Meadow’ in honor of late park planner Margaret Macleod.

Though the idea has existed for decades, the Issaquah City Council expressly outlined a plan to create the network of open space in the Central Issaquah Plan, approved in December 2012.